WarBalls

Shiuming Lai interviews LinkoVitch

Shiuming: LinkoVitch, how did you come to be at JagFest? Please fill us in on your personal Atari history.

LinkoVitch: My first encounter with Atari would have to be when I was around six or seven years old, my uncle who lived locally got himself an Atari 400 (membrane keyboard), I remember my dad asking me if I wanted to go and see his computer, I didn't even know what a computer was back then (oh how things change!).

I was fascinated from the start, and was always keen to have a go. My first programs (yup I was programming at the age of seven) mainly consisted of taking random lines out of various game listings in C&VG and seeing what happened. Eventually I figured out what was going on and began writing some simple programs in BASIC. I got my first Atari, a 600XL, I dragged my dad around Manchester looking for one, I actually turned down an 800XL for some crazy reason! Kids! I had a few good years of playing games and writing code on my 600XL until one unfortunate day when plugging it together on the big TV in the front room, I slipped with the data recorder's power connector and plugged it into the spare I/O port on the back of the unit, many pretty colours appeared on the screen as I dumped the 9 V supply direct into my 600XL's I/O port. "Oh that's pretty" I thought and did it again on purpose... and then the screen went black, and never again did it work (odd, that!).

I was without my own Atari for a while, but eventually my parents who now saw less of me because I was always round my uncle's using his 800XL, decided to nurture my craving and got me my own 800XL and new data recorder, which I named Benson (800XL) and Boris (data recorder), and took a lot more care of. This lasted me well into my early teens, towards the end of my 8-bit days I was learning 6502 assembler and hand-assembling it with bits of paper and a calculator as I couldn't find an assembler anywhere for it! By this time my uncle had an Atari 520STFM, which really distracted me from my 8-bit, the graphics, the sound... I remember first trying Starglider and sitting in awe when it started to sing! The graphics of Barbarian by Psygnosis, and Terrapods. My love of Atari grew, in a year or so my uncle decided a 520 wasn't enough and upgraded to a 1040STFM, and very kindly gave me his ST... That was it, I was off! I rapidly amassed games and software for it, and by the age of around 13 I was dabbling in 68000 assembler, by 14 I had written my own scroll routines and palette switching code and was progressing well.

Then one fateful month ST Format featured Michtron BBS software on its cover, and I (having upgraded to 2.5 MB of RAM, I was a god among my peers!) I set up a BBS in a RAM disk and became hooked on the idea of a BBS. With the inheritance I received from my grandad's death I bought myself a hard drive (240 MB Seagate which I still have) in a Gasteiner case, and a Supra 2400 modem. Using the software from ST Format I set up LSI BBS (I was around 16 at this time). It became quite popular with a growing file base and a few regular users, however there was no feature to use the mail echoes with Michtron and there were also issues with the file base when it became large, and speed. Having made good friends with a local SySop who ran Mersey BBS which became Nickelodeon BBS  (he loved his cartoons!) Mark Williams helped me set up QBBS and Xenia, and The Crow BBS was born. With the inclusion of a midnight line feed and a lot of mail echoes the popularity grew, and I would sometimes get 20+ users in one day. At one stage the BBS was the busiest node on InfiniNet (Tim Putnam's network).

Unfortunately, I was missing out on playing with my ST as it was always on-line running the BBS, I acquired an STE from an auction for £30 and had a dual keyboard arrangement for a while, but my college work was leaning to requiring a PC more and more, so eventually I managed to obtain a PC. This worked well for a while but all my ST hardware took up a lot of desktop real estate so I migrated the BBS over to my PC under OS/2 Warp so I could multi-task while the BBS was still running. This was the last time I used my STs, they were put in storage.

The release of the Jaguar was the next big thing for me, I still loved my Ataris but there was so little support for them in my area, my friends all had PCs so the Jag was a great way to get back with Atari, my friends seemed to be buying them too, and it was good for a while, but the high prices and lack of shops selling games/peripherals for them meant I only got 2-3 games for my Jag and it was put back in its box and into a cupboard.

Fast-forward about 8-9 years, and my wife was asking me to buy her something she had found on eBay. I entered the auction a little on the cautious side, and won. Then I sold an amp on eBay, that went well. Bored one day I decided to see just what junk was on eBay, so after a few comedy searches just out of curiosity I tried "Atari". The few hundred results that came back woke me up as to just how popular it still was. I tried "Atari Jaguar" and found a lot of stuff, too... including a Procontroller for sale (I cannot remember whose), I asked what games were supported and they pointed me at AtariAge, I was expecting some crappy broken link fest of a page, not the highly polished very active site I did find. The old Atarian in me woke up... the following months were an onslaught on eBay, automated watchers for all things Atari. My Jag was quickly dug out of storage along with my STs and game after game was bought, my Jag collection is no longer just 2-3 titles, it is now in the region of 40+ titles.

Wasn't long before my programming urges got me interested in developing on the Jag, and chatting with Starcat (Lars Hannig) got me really interested. I spoke with Thunderbird also about the JUGS system as I didn't fancy opening up my beloved Jag. However I discovered I needed a BattleSphere Gold cart which was expensive and out of stock, plus the idea of a serial upload didn't sound too good. I learnt more about BJL, and widened my eBay search to include Jaguar systems, too. I found an awesome deal, a Jaguar, CD unit and a stack of games for £150. I joined forces with Blodge (Matt Blower) who was also an Atari fan I had met at college, and we bought it between us, splitting it to give Matt a decent sized game collection and the CD unit he didn't have (I had bought and repaired one by now, see my guides at http://www.linkovitch.me.uk). I now had a sacrificial Jag to attack with my soldering iron. I bought a BJL off Starcat, but due to something wrong in the postal service (probably being close to Christmas) it didn't arrive for a long time, fortunately whilst chatting with Stone (Nick Bamji) he said he had a spare one, a few days later I was soldering like a man possessed (when Starcat's chip did arrive I put it to one side to feature in my BJL mod guide on a Jag for Blower). That was it, I was off... I downloaded most of Starcat's site, printed out the development manual and set to writing some code (my first code I wrote under Project Tempest, but that didn't work properly on a real Jag so I stopped until I had my BJL system working).

And now, with two friends we plan to make our mark on the Jaguar platform, and finally give something back to Atari for all the fun I have had over the years because of them. I still get excited when I see the Fuji in its original state, even a little when I see it on new games (not as much as watching an old '80s film like D.A.R.Y.L. which almost has me jumping up and down on the couch... my wife is already worried enough by me!).

Shiuming: Can you also give us information about your other crew members, including the one who didn't make JagFest? How did you meet and what roles do you perform within the group?

LinkoVitch: I met Blodge (Matt Blower) at college, I found out eventually that he too was an ST fiend and also then he got a Jaguar, in fact he was the person who first lent me Tempest 2000 (which I creased the manual of by accident, oops!). Having similar tastes in humour and music (warped), we got on like a house on fire, and still do. We have spent many an hour (on company time too, as he works for my ex-employer), talking about computer games, when I found out I could code for the Jag I mentioned it to him and he seemed keen also, modern systems just don't have the same feel to them I think). As neither of us can draw or do anything remotely artistic, we decided to ask a few friends of ours if they would be interested, SkyFire (Phil Long) was instantly interested, and thought it a great idea, even though he didn't actually have a Jag, he did recognise the Atari name. SkyFire and I batted a few names around for what we should call our group, we decided on U-235 as it would fit nicely with what was going to be (may still be) our first game, "Chain Reaction" which is my baby.

Shiuming: Matthew Preston explained to me some things about your development PC before you arrived in the bar on the Saturday morning. Something about it running Linux and also having a great sensitivity to its orientation, were there technical problems? I must admit to feeling a slight urge to offer help, but dealing with ridiculous PC problems all day long at work was exactly what I went to JagFest to get away from as far as possible!

LinkoVitch: Sod's Law! The PC in question was originally a Windows 98 machine that I had at work with me for burning CDs. When I left the company I obviously took it home with me. It was the perfect candidate to take to JagFest as it was a complete system, which had no further use to me. Also very low spec so no real loss if it was damaged. The system had worked fine for years without problem. On the Friday morning I began to set it up to be my Jag development machine whilst at JagFest so we could show off our still unfinished demo. I installed Linux (all my development is done in Linux - I see Windows as more of a toy OS for playing games!), seemed well, I did a quick test of uploading via BJL to ensure the parallel port was working correctly, and then found that there was no parallel or serial ports in the machine at all! A quick hunt around, I remembered my one year old son had been playing with a blanking plate adorned with ports the previous day, he's a star it was exactly what I needed and I would never have found it if it wasn't for him (he loves wires!). That fitted I tried and it failed. I almost at that point threw it out the window, however a quick BIOS adjustment and all was well. I quickly put it all together and collected Blodge. We loaded up my new car (which I had bought the day before!) and everything fitted perfectly... and off we went.

Shiuming: What car have you bought?

LinkoVitch: T registration Rover 420 SLDi Turbo, 118,000 on the clock, electric windows, AC (which was very useful and used for the whole drive due to the sun), power steering, air bags (passenger and driver), electric wing mirrors, alloy wheels, ABS, deep red (burgundy), not bad for £3,000!

Shiuming: I see, so that's the one I photographed in the car park. Bargain, indeed! I remember a plain vanilla J registration 1.3 petrol Peugeot 309 costing me £5,000 and it had none of those luxuries (just lower mileage). Sacha Hofer also drives a Rover, a 75. Rovers aren't very common over in mainland Europe, hence his choice to be "different" in cars as well as computers. I'm quite tempted to have a modern turbodiesel for my next car. Getting back to your PC...

LinkoVitch: Sod's Law, we get to JagFest, unpack and I test the system is working still... hit the power switch, and nothing! Blank screen. I deemed it was most likely a loose connection as the unit had been in the boot of the car for the last 250 miles. We obtained a screwdriver from TXG (thanks again), I had forgotten mine! We opened it up and began foraging around... At this point Nick Harlow announced the mass exodus to get food. So off we went.

After much local wildlife spotting, and the comedy that is watching Tyrant (Nick Turner) try to eat an Italian pizza with a knife and fork (being civil or something he claimed) we got back to the hotel. I hit the power switch on my PC and up it came, no problems! A big cheer was heard all round! I did a quick test and the BJL stuff I had on there worked, too... I tried putting it back together and it worked. Then bed...

Following morning, day of the fest, turned on the PC and it crashed during booting. Borrowed TXG's screwdriver again, and opened it up. Eventually managed after some card-swapping to get the system to stay up, in the upright position, without the case on. I have since had the machine booted at home, but only on its side. I think due to its age some of the PCI contacts are a bit loose.

The system itself was running Red Hat Linux 7.3 (Valhalla) which is what I use on my home PC for my development. I had forgotten to bring or set up a proper X software so was forced to use CDE as my windows manager, which looks awful and is a pain to use. But it served a purpose. The PC itself was not meant to be part of our stand, but got quite a few questions asked about it, it was only there to allow us to upload code onto our Jag.

Shiuming: I think lying on its side might have drawn some attention to it! Now please tell us about this demo, WarBalls. It caught my attention due to the music it was playing for a short while, a tracker module I remember from ten years ago, very funky rhythm and very small file size, only around 20 KB as I remember. Then for the rest of the time it was changed to a different tune which can be heard on the videos that were filmed during the event, I believe this is the tune you referred to as being Stone's.

LinkoVitch: Heh, the demo I am not very proud of. I am glad I got it to work, and some parts I am happy with, but it is very simple and buggy which irritates me.

The initial idea/plan was to have at least some part of WarBalls working for JagFest, however due to mass laziness all round we didn't get anything done. So I thought the best bet would to be at least have a sort of story board intro which we could show at JagFest, this is what the demo was supposed to be for, hence its shortness. Blodge was tasked with making the story boards, which SkyFire was then going to draw up nicely. However, Blodge is not renowned for getting anything done, so he only started the story boards on Wednesday, and didn't finish them (well I don't think he has so far). We spent some time trying to get them finished to some extent, but I had code problems, and it was taking a fair while to ink up the images. We called it a night and deemed to try and get something done Thursday morning. I killed a few bugs, but had to build the PC we were taking, Blodge drew up some more story boards. We planned to finish off at the fest.

We never did, once I got the demo sort of reliably looping, we called it a day. Save to add some music. I found the Sinister Developments mod player on my machine's hard disk, and incorporated that into the demo, so it had something a little more, I also found some tracker mods on the hard disk. Blodge was adamant to pick a tune that wouldn't be blatantly recognized as being ripped off (I was happy with the title music from Turrican 2!). We found a mod called newsong2.mod and loaded that up. Blodge didn't recognize it, but I had a slight twinkle in the back of my mind. Blodge decided that this tune would be most likely unrecognized by most people (he has a substantial mod collection). I then realised the tune we had on the demo was actually sent to me by Stone a few months back... so the tune deemed least likely to be recognized as being ripped off, was actually written by someone who was stood chatting in the next room! I found this hilarious, but thought it best to ask. Stone said he thought he heard something familiar and said it was OK for us to use. Thanks.

The demo itself is all 68K-based (apart from the DSP code for the Sinister Developments tracker player). It is 90% my own code, I have written the object list creation code myself, and all the code needed to switch between scenes and fade. The fade routine is a bit of a con, it is my old fave routine from the ST adapted to run with 256 colours instead of 16 (it was written from memory though). It just works on the CLUT and not on each pixel... The bouncing logos were drawn by SkyFire, as was the WarBalls logo. The JagFest logo is none other than Stone's which I lifted of the JagFest UK web site, all other graphics (including the misspelt ones!) were done by myself. The bouncing logos are simply ten objects whose X and Y co-ordinates are changed each VBL.

LinkoVitch: WarBalls is intended to be a clone of MIDI Maze on the ST. However, there is a lot to be decided. Our original idea is to present it in a sort of Dungeon Master/Captive fixed viewpoint as I used to love this style of game on my ST. Also it makes for easier coding! This has a few other benefits which I think should add to the game-play. Namely we intend to make this game network playable (I think I may be able to get 128 player possible!) so one thing that bugs me about this type of game on a console is the lack of turning speed. Imagine player A is looking down a corridor onto which there is a doorway from another corridor, if player B comes through that opening, then player A has the time it takes player B to rotate and face player A to shoot, giving player A a substantial advantage over player B. What I was thinking is that if players move in a grid fashion and rotate at 90 degrees a time, then the advantage is reduced greatly, there is a good chance player B can turn and see player A before player A gets a shot off.

In WarBalls we plan to have a user-customizable face on your own warball which, with the method we have chosen, should give around 130+ possible faces!

Chances are that the WarBalls project may be a bit ambitious for us at present, I still have a lot to learn, so I think I may work on a smaller, simpler project which should give me a good learning experience, and also get another title into the Jag scene faster!

Shiuming: The Starcat Developments CD you were selling, what is that all about? Matthew Preston bought one and has raved about how good it is. I did personally ask Lars (Starcat) whether he'd be attending JagFest and he said he couldn't so I presume you were selling these on his behalf.

LinkoVitch: Starcat has been a great help with getting me started in Jag development. We seem to share a similar sense of humour and again, taste in music, so I would consider him a friend even though I have never met him. I asked him if he would be attending JagFest UK, and he said he would like to but couldn't make it, which was a shame as I was looking forward to meeting him. As I was going to be there definitely, I asked if he would like me to sell his CDs on his behalf, he decided on a very good price and I made up the CDs to take. I only added on a small fee to cover the materials used to make the CDs and label them, the rest of the money was sent back to Starcat.

The CD itself is like his old site, a treasure chest of Jaguar goodies. There are tools, documents, examples, for almost all formats on there. Both the official and the underground documents are on the CD. Tools for Alpine and BJL, official Atari demos, and some written by Starcat and other underground coders. It even features Starcat's development library which is aimed at getting the new Jag developer on their feet in minutes. It's a great CD.

Shiuming: I think Lars does an admirable job of supporting the Jaguar community, I look forward to Star Alliance, and all the other projects using his development library, including WarBalls! Many thanks for your time, please keep us posted on your work in progress.

shiuming@myatari.net

MyAtari magazine - JagFest highlight 7, July 2003